August 13, 2012

The headline "Top Ryan Google searches: 'vice president,' 'shirtless" made me skeptical. What about the other Ryan — the Ryan whose fame as the Ryan of the Moment got overshadowed and whose Ryan-fame was heavily torso-related — Ryan Lochte? But getting to the article, I see they were looking at "Paul Ryan" searches, not mixing up the Ryans.

It's really not that odd that people are searching the internet for Paul Ryan shirtless. For one thing, people are always searching the internet for named individuals naked or in some degree of nakedness. Remember all the fuss about Sarah Palin in a bikini?

But interest in the bare-chested version of Paul Ryan is not merely the usual interest in naked and semi-naked celebrities. From the day he was announced at Romney's VP pick, there have been articles about Paul's fitness routine, how rigorous it is, how wide his shoulders are, and how little body fat he has*:

"I'm kind of a workout guy. I've always been into it. [Former Mich. Rep.] Bart Stupak and I lead [P90X classes] — there's about a dozen of us that do it," Ryan told Politico. "It works because it hits your body in many different ways: pull-ups, sit-ups, lots of cardio, karate, jump training, yoga. It pushes your body...and gets you out of your plateau."

The Wisconsin congressman has been a devotee of the brutal P90X workout for about four years, and frequently leads workouts with other members of Congress. P90X is a 90-day workout plan that involves intensive cardio combined with yoga, karate and other fitness staples for 60 to 90 minutes a day, six days a week. Created in 2005 by Santa Monica, California-based fitness guru Tony Horton and sold as a $140 package of DVDs, the workout bills itself as “extreme home fitness.”...

Horton said that former Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner used the P90X plan, and anyone who saw the accidental Twitter pictures that were his political downfall has seen the evidence firsthand. “He’s hardcore,” Horton said.

Hardcore... Anthony Weiner.... With prodding like that — if you weren't interested based on Ryan's own advertisement of his physical fitness — how can you not Google "Paul Ryan shirtless"? We're human beings and the internet is the internet and he kind of asked for it,** didn't he?

"Not every man is strong, but every man can be strong through hard work," explains Ryan. "So long as government is not allowed to encroach on our Second Amendment liberties, you maintain the right to bare arms, legs and an insanely chiseled torso. Get your pump on and sell as many tickets as you want to the gun show."...

Begin run. Visualize shining city on the hill because it is easily defended from shiftless bloato wrecks, carb-diners, milk chuggers and gay-married pizza princes. Surrounded by the land of unwanted workers and broken pleasure robots, only our guns and our incredible lithe bodies will protect us from corrosive morality.

Humor. Deal with it.
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* Is it healthy to have only 6 to 8% body fat? You doctors out there, what do you say to patients with such low body fat? I've read — in the New York Times — "Too Little Fat Can Be as Bad as Too Much." ("Researchers have found that life with too little fat can be as fraught with medical complications as life with too much fat and, bizarrely, the complications are often exactly the same....") [ADDED: Ryan's father and grandfather died young from heart attacks. If "the complications are often exactly the same," is Ryan's intense pursuit of fitness — perhaps motivated by fear of the same fate — dangerous?]

"By they way, is it healthy to have only 6 to 8% body fat? You doctors out "there, what do you say to patients with such low body fat? "

Women whose body fat gets that low, or even higher, stop menstruating. There seems to be a relationship between body fat levels and the ability to sustain a pregnancy. Many women marathoners stop menstruating and have to cut back on running if they want to get pregnant.

Quote from first link"Most people in the political class assume Americans associate Paul Ryan with his controversial budget plan."

Reality - most people understand that the Obama administration has no budget. The media hides this basic fact, so some low information voters (aka democrats) are confused about the real reason we are in a mess.

Add to that spending most of his time as an adult working for the government in DC. Not to mention some of the crazier economic assumptions in his budget plan. Why is this guy supposed to be anything other than more of the same shit that got us into this mess?

I had a favorable opinion of him until I learned that he's one of those politicians who believes in amending the Constitution for every little thing that scares stupider political constituents, like flag burning and defining "marriage".

Anyone with that little respect for our Constitution, and with so little understanding of why it was written as it was, should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

Palladian said... I had a favorable opinion of him until I learned that he's one of those politicians who believes in amending the Constitution for every little thing that scares stupider political constituents, like flag burning and defining "marriage".

Anyone with that little respect for our Constitution,

The Amendment process is something the founders laid out and is part of the Constitution.

Isn't he? Well, Obama is thin. True though that thin doesn't equate to fit. I have not seen Obama shirtless. Where are the shirtless Obama photos? Does he have pecks or moobs? These are the important questions.

I'm beginning to think I'm not normal. I didn't even think about looking for pictures of Ryan shirtless. Of course, now I'm resisting looking for them because I don't want to be part of the sideshow crowd. In the hunting pictures Ryan looks like my dad, so now I'm all Freudian. I think I'll try to find a picture of him with a pocket protector and a slide rule.

Isn't he? Well, Obama is thin. True though that thin doesn't equate to fit. I have not seen Obama shirtless. Where are the shirtless Obama photos? Does he have pecks or moobs? These are the important questions.

There is that staged photo of Obama at the beach, released prior to the 2008 election, but I don't want to look for it because I don't want to give the Google algorithm the wrong idea about me.

Wait, really? The media has allowed you to go through life without seeing the photo of him emerging from the oceans with built in UV ray protection telling the clouds to not act stupidly and block his sun?

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress

For the WIN! I wouldn't expect it to make sense to you, Jay, because you're an idiot.

Jay, the point is that the constitution documents how the government should be structured and run as well as what it can and cannot do, and shouldn't be involved in every little dipshit matter that makes someone or another get their panties in a twist. Flag burning doesn't exactly rise to the level of, say, amending how the President is elected or ending slavery or defining exactly who is entitled to the franchise.

"Interesting, a couple Althouse conservative commenters not thrilled with Romney's choice, Palladian and Bender. Odd men out and they couldn't be more different from each other."

I have to take issue with your comment, as I'm not strictly a conservative, and I don't think Ryan is the worst choice Romney could have made. I think it's healthy to register legitimate differences of opinion one has with politicians, especially perhaps with politicians one is nominally supporting for election. There is little as distasteful to me as slavish agreement with and knee-jerk defense of politicians just because they're on the same "side" as you.

My objections to Ryan (at this point) will not affect my theoretical vote for Romney, especially since the office of vice-President is a rather limited one. But it's still important to discuss philosophical and practical differences.

It should be noted, however, that this is different than the sort of thing that Bender and especially Crack Emcee engage in here in the comments. Disagreement is not the same as repetitive irrational whinging.

It's evidence of how much stronger conservative arguments are that the left feels they need this added advantage and still are scared to death. Conservatives are used to this crap. In fact, is just another badge of honor for conservatives that the left brings it's big brother (MSM) to the fight and will still lose it.

This must be devastating for them to be, not only on the losing end of the arguments, but to be in the unusual position this time of not even having the more attractive ticket in the superficial optics, youth, and vibrancy angles.

Ok, RE: Ryan, I think the flag burning thing is stupid, but I am WAY more concerned about the budget and the debt and Romney/Ryan, though far from perfect, are at least somewhat more likely to try to work on that than anybody on the Obama side. At the very least, maybe they'll stop digging the hole.

So, I'm pretty much a single issue voter and it's going to take more than a stupid, politiciany kind of amendment to make me vote for somebody else. None of these people are perfect, but you have to compare it with the alternative.

There is no problem with some having concerns about Ryan or any other candidate. If this was a left-wing site then you might not get any friendly fire, but thankfully it's different here. Cheerleaders like me are welcome, but we don't own the place.

If Jesus Christ was running for Pope, some here would complain about his footwear, and maybe they would have a point.

Jay, the point is that the constitution documents how the government should be structured and run as well as what it can and cannot do, and shouldn't be involved in every little dipshit matter that makes someone or another get their panties in a twist

Oh sorry Icepick, I forgot to include you in the Althouse conservatives commenters not thrilled with Paul Ryan. So now that makes three, Bender, Palladian and Icepick, any more?

I wouldn't say I'm not thrilled. I'm just of the opinion that Ryan is pretty untested and lacks big accomplishments at this point. I don't want to see conservatives pumping his tires the way the Dems pumped Obama's in 08. It's wish-casting and unseemly for people who think critically and at all empirically.

I'm not saying don't get behind him and support him as loudly as you'd like. Just don't do the whole deification thing, or cast him as America's Savior. At this point he's an informed dart-toss. Hopefully one that hits the bullseye, but that remains to be seen.

If you want to get your money's worth for your time on earth, fitness is a good investment.....I've known some people who live in utterly uninhabitable bodies. They have nice apartments and wonder why life is so depressing..... I don't know what the optimum balance is between work, exercise, and Chinese food, but it you are not in sufficient shape to jog five miles you're missing out. I think a great deal of psychological problems are, in fact, due to physiology. You can only consume so many toxins before your life becomes toxic. A lot of those toxins are sweat soluble. A good workout should be part of your life.

When I was 17 I read The Fountainhead and, like a lot of 17 year-olds who read that book for the first time, I was inspired and thought all had been confirmed/explained.

A year later I read Atlas Shrugged and thought, 'well, ok, there's a tad bit of bullshit in this one, but it is mostly right' and thus was even more inspired and thought, why doesn't everyone see how simple it all is?

Then I read her "study" of art and literature, A Romantic Manifesto. And thought, good God, she's a brilliant art critic too! This woman is on fire!

Her works are miles wide but not even a scintilla deep, however. The "Life, the Universe, and Everything" epiphany that she overtly claims to be bringing about, does not sustain in a healthy, curious, reasonable mind.

If you think life is filled with flat, static, melodramatically framed characters and situations, though, her fiction and her ideas might well be for you!

I too read Rand in my late teens. I found her ideas exciting, but since I was way liberal, they didn't stick. I also noticed, even then, how flat and melodramatic, to the point of unbelievable, her characters were.

My favorite Rand exaggeration was her name for the architecture critic, "Ellsworth Toohey," which I heard in my mind's ear as "Ellsworth P-tui!"

I still think her writing qua writing is terrible, but I have sure been surprised since 2008 to see her villains come to life in all their grotesque glory in the Democratic Party.

"If you think life is filled with flat, static, melodramatically framed characters..."

bagoh20, you wrote:

Well, yea, mostly it is, except the Kardashians, they blow Rand's ideas all to hell.

Oh, Rand actually accounted for the "Kardashian type" in all her fiction, and would feel vindicated (she always argued that everything vindicated her, though, so one loses count) by the way those people are portrayed.

Indeed, I actually think Rand would have loved reality tv. She would have really thought it was real!!!! She was above the concept of editing.

But in truth, no, life is not made up of those things. One's desire that it be that way is a vapid, even dangerous inclination. Better to look closer.

Palladian The human brain is compsed of about 60% fats. This should tell you something about people obsessed with reducing their body fat.

If you have low body fat that automatically proves you are obsessed with having a low body fat? Baloney. I've got about 6% and eat tons of fat. My morning coffee includes 3 TBS butter and 1 TBS of medium chain triglycerides. Yum. And my brain loves it.

Rand thought Margaret Mitchell was a better artist than Shakespeare or Faulkner or Melville or Twain. Objectively a better artist, natch.

Now I like Margaret Mitchell as much as the next cat, but that says a lot about her right there. And it dovetails with her social economic views. She said so herself! The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are filled with passages showing how it all ties together into her uber simple moralistic matrix.

Ryan is not the only politician, of course, to have stated Rand as a deep influence on his life and ideology (though he rejected the atheism part, so to her he would be no better than a piece of maggoty dogshit, but let's not worry about semantics when the Freedom Market and a economic morality tale are at stake).

But he is the most high profile to have publicaly embraced her, in a while. There has been lots of Rand rhetoric lately. Heck, they made a horrible movie of Atlas Shrugged.

So maybe Rand's ideas need to be scrutinized in the public conversation for real. If her ideas matter to people in power, then her ideas matter.

Well, yes. When it comes to economic and foreign policy, one would be a fool NOT to assume he would govern with Rand's ideas in mind.

It is true that Rand would have hated Paul Ryan as much as she would have hated Hugo Chavez. But Ryan need not be constrained by that. Lots of Rand devotees just chop off the atheism part and assume the rest grows back together intact.

It doesn't stay intact when you remove the atheism, of course. Not that we'd want it to stay intact, however!

Religious and nonreligious alike, reasonable people of all stripes outgrow Ayn Rand.

It tasts like coconuts, if it's extra virgin, I buy the more refined, hardly has any flavor at all. Good for sautéing and adding to dark chocolate, melted down, a splash of heavy cream, sweetener and any nuts or shredded unsweetend coconut, if you like , homemade healthy chocolate, mmmmmmm.